Lodgix.com Manuals & Tutorials

Search Rentals Widget

Within WordPress, under Appearance > Widgets, you will find the Search Rentals widget. This is a simple, but powerful tool for vacation rental managers and owners with larger number of properties who want to make it easier for their website guests to search their inventory.

One of the coolest features of this widget is that it filters in real-time to display the number of properties that match your search criteria. Too many systems force the guest to choose a series of search criteria and then click a "search" button, only to return a message, "I am sorry no results matched your search criteria, please try again!". How frustrating is that!!!

With Lodgix, we return the results on the fly, thus if zero results are returned you'll know immediately which criteria caused the results to equal zero and allow you to make an adjustment.

Note: The Location field can be setup under the area manager within Lodgix.

Search by Price

When the Search By Price option is selected, you will be presented with three settings...

From Price: This is the lowest price point that can be searched.

To Price: This is the highest price point that can be searched.

Price Increment: This determines the ranges that will be available to search.

For example, a from price of 100, a to price of 600, and an increment of 100 will produce options of 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600. Note that guest can also choose to not specify a price range for their search.

Amenities Filter

The rental search widget within the Lodgix.com WordPress plugin can now filter by amenities! To enable the amenities filter:

Within WordPress go to Appearance > Widgets

Find the Rentals Search widget and there will be a check box for "Amenities"

Check the box and click the Save button.

Go to Settings > Lodgix settings within Wordpress and at the bottom of the page, click on the button Save and Regenerate the pages (this will force the widget to pull the chosen amenity filters from Lodgix).

How do I select which amenities the guests can select to filter their search results?

Search Results

The search results that are returned will show all properties WITH AVAILABILITY. However, in those instances where a property has additional rules that are not met (e.g. requires a Saturday arrival or requires a 7 night minimum rental) those properties will be clearly noted and the guest will not be able to book those properties online until the dates are changed to satisfy the rules for the property. Those properties will also have a Check Availability icon which will link the guest to the calendar where they will be able to see what dates would work, and allow them to book online when the rules are met.

For properties WITH AVAILABILITY and whose rules are all satisfied those properties will display a different icon to book online now. When a guest clicks on the Book Online now icon, the guest will be taken to the booking page where more details and a rate breakdown are displayed.

Notes from Development

The rentals search widget uses AJAX and a REST API. Any designer with minimum jQuery knowledge can query the API and receive the same results with a URL like: